Sunil Maini, BS’85, recently was appointed to the advisory board of the International Center at UT Dallas. He is also the chairman of the U.S. India Chamber of Commerce. He graduated in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance. The board is chaired by Dr. Richard C. Benson, UT Dallas president; and Dr. Inga H. Musselman, UT Dallas provost, vice president for academic affairs.

Ashley Sharp, BS’09, MPA’11, worked with students in the Jindal School’s Social Impact Marketing (MKT4360) and Capstone Senior Project (BPS 4395) courses during the spring semester. Sharp is CEO of Dwell With Dignity, a nonprofit group of interior designers and volunteers dedicated to creating soothing, inspiring homes for families struggling with homelessness and poverty. She earned a double degree in art & performance and business administration in 2009. She also holds a master’s degree in public administration from UT Dallas.

“Coming back to the university to work with students directly has been an absolute dream come true,” she said. “As the CEO of a nonprofit, I realize collaboration is the most effective way to infuse new ideas and energy into our work, so I jumped at the opportunity to work alongside students in the Jindal School of Management to come up with innovative solutions in the realms of marketing, social impact and supply chain management.”

Sharp said that the students gain real-world experience and the opportunity to apply their insights and field-test their ideas while Dwell with Dignity benefits from the fresh perspectives and creative solutions that each group generates.

“This has been such an impactful process for me, and I cannot wait to share the results of our work together,” she said.

Kevin Patel, BS’06(computer science), MBA’10, recently was named one of The Future 50 in Dallas-Fort Worth for 2023. Patel is the founder and CEO of HermTac, a company that got its start after winning three national innovation awards fighting COVID-19 and now manufactures frontier hard technology products — built from innovative technologies that were not possible to achieve until recently — to get care to military veterans.

Most recently HermTac has been developing a wide range of veteran suicide reduction programs along with several other UT Dallas alumni: Dr. Marilyn Kaplan, PhD’98 (management science); Veronica Alviso, BS’05 (psychology); and Truong Pham, BS’00 (business administration) BS’01 (computer science). The company is housed at the UT Dallas Venture Development Center.

Vijayan Nagarajan, MS’17, senior data scientist for Amazon Web Services, has received seven patents since graduation as part of a team from his former employer, AT&T, most recently for a data science machine learning application that the team built. Nagarajan earned a master’s in business analytics from the Jindal School in 2017.

Wande Elam, MS’21, managing counsel, Toyota Motor North America, Inc., and Toyota Connected North America, was a panelist at a D Magazine Women Leaders in Law event March 30. Elam earned a Master of Science in Leadership and Organizational Development.